Thursday, October 30, 2014

Lude Smuggler Will Not Be Suppressed

So I was perusing through Macintosh Garden in the arcade section, taking a trip down memory lane, when I noticed something not quite right. They had MacLanding and Missile Command and even its awesome clone, Ground Zero™, but still, something was missing. Lude Smuggler!

Lude Smuggler, for the uninitiated, was a re-skin of Lode Runner, which for a time was the addictive game de jour before Tetris and Cranky Birds or whatever. The object of Lode Runner was to dodge a bunch of enemies while collecting bags of gold and escaping to the next level. Lude Smuggler was the same, but instead of bags of gold, they're supposed to be bags of ludes.

So after failing to find Lude Smuggler on Macintosh Garden, I went googling to find some confirmation of its existence and couldn't find anything. I googled Lude Smuggler with quotes and got this:

Can this be? Can there be literally no record of Lude Smuggler on the entire World Wide Web? No, no, no, no, no. This cannot stand. I know the drug war is taken to ridiculous extremes, but this is going too far. I knew I had Lude Smuggler on some hard drive somewhere, or at least on a floppy, so I became determined to retrieve it and upload it to the hallowed halls of the 'Garden.

So I got out my Power Mac 7100, which was my only Mac with a still-working high-density floppy drive, and hooked up my LCD monitor (with like a thousand adapters) and fired it up. Still works! And it turns out I did have Lude Smuggler on a floppy. Great! Now I just need to network it to my PowerBook and I can upload it from there.

(Author's note: Okay, I wrote about 800 words here about everything I had to do to get it to my Powerbook, but I'm cutting it because, frankly, it makes me sound crazy. Tl;dr version: it was a bitch.)

So finally Lude Smuggler is re-introduced to the masses. You can download it at its hopefully permanent home at Macintosh Garden and be smuggling ludes like a pro in no time. Here's the icon which my young impressionable mind would forever associate with "greasy":